Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.
Management
Global operating rates stay probably, I would say, in the low 90%s. Again, that's a tough number to talk about – well, to try to calculate, because when I look at global operating rates, you're looking at design capacities. And oftentimes MDI facilities in particular because they are trickier facilities to run, if you have a facility that's designed to operate at 400,000 metric tons, it's pretty rare that you actually get that 400,000 metric tons out of it, because you're constantly having to go through maintenance work, T&Is and so forth. So oftentimes, we look at this capacity utilization on a theoretical basis that looks like today that it would be in the high 80%s, around 90%. I would say globally that we're in the low 90%, though it feels in some areas that it's tighter than that. I would imagine that Europe is in the mid to high 90%s. America, it feels like is in the mid to high 90%s, and Asia is obviously below 90%. But, again, as I look at Asia, I continue to see what feels like pretty good market conditions in Asia, margin-wise, demand and growth. And I'm not sure that that stated capacity in Asia is – that necessarily means that's how much MDI you can actually produce. So sorry. That's a rather long answer, but oftentimes, you look at a lot of these analyst reports and so forth that are showing MDI and somebody will start an MDI facility up midway through the next year, and they'll show that facility starting up several hundred thousand metric tons over night, and then it just operates at that going forward. And that just is not the case in MDI. These facilities take months to commission and start up. And as we've seen over the last couple of years, not just in Huntsman, but in the industry, these facilities, especially, the larger you build them, you get a single contaminant that goes in, and the entire facility comes down, and you're going through that start-up procedure all over again. So it feels that we're right globally around 90%-plus.